The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness.

What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte's simply saying to him that she didn't like him enough.

This he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit.

She did like him enough--nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that he was restless for her as well as for himself.

She looked at him hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best moment of conviction that--as a man, so to speak--he properly pleased her.